Crystal Reports 8.5: A First Look

Before reviewing Crystal Reports 8.5, it is interesting to note that there is a new name in town-Crystal Decisions. For those of you familiar with Seagate Software, they have changed their name. On March 5, Seagate Software officially changed its name to Crystal Decisions. Creg Kerfoot, president and chief executive officer of Crystal Decisions had this to say about the name:

"The name Crystal Decisions gives us a cohesive, instantly-recognizable identity."

He also stated:

"With the world's most popular design tool for high-performance reporting, a globally scalable web information delivery infrastructure, and a sophisticated application development technology for advanced business analysis-Crystal Decisions' market leadership is clear."

A few years ago I was in a discussion where bets were being placed on how long Crystal Reports was going to last as a product. At the time, two of the leading development tools were going through some changes that could adversely affect the growth of the Crystal Reports market. Microsoft had chosen to build its own report writer into Visual Basic. The PowerBuilder market was simply eroding. Expectation was that the large numbers of developers using Crystal Reports on these platforms would be begin migrating to other tools, and thus the future of Crystal Reports seemed in serous jeopardy.

The Visual Basic report writer was weak at best when compared to Crystal Reports. As to the PowerBuilder audience, many have gone to Visual Basic. While Crystal Reports future looked bleak at the time, the future has offered a surprise. Crystal Reports still dominates the third-part tools for reporting. With Version 8.5 now officially released, it looks as if Crystal Decisions is going to continue to hold on to their market. With 7 million licenses shipped, they have a market worth holding on to.

What's the point of Crystal Reports? With Crystal Reports you can easily deliver rich, interactive content in a usable format from virtually any data source. You can publish this content within your applications as well as on the Web. Following is a list of the features for Crystal Reports 8.5:

Crystal Reports is an example of a product that not only has lots of bells and whistles, but it is also being created to meet a need. As such, it continues to be a product of choice for developers. For more information check out their website at www.crystaldecisions.net

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